Team Leaders

Bill Cokas

Creative Director

b. Washington, D.C. Followed grandma’s roots and ended up at UNC. Followed job offer to Chicago. After Tony Bennett put his words to music in a radio jingle, decided work there was done.

Returned to NC to build big brands for small companies–and because it was closer to Key West, ground zero for Parrotheads. Returned to UNC to teach big ideas to tomorrow’s underpaid ad hopefuls.

Distinctly recalls being influenced by ad icon-wannabes like Goofy Grape and the walking, talking Koogle jar, which advertised products that were parity and disgusting, respectively. Abhors irrelevant celebrity spokespeople and contrived cross-promotions. Currently admires the strategy and tagline (but not so much the executions) of Expedia’s “Travel Yourself Interesting” campaign.

Since social media has spawned countless self-proclaimed “experts” on every subject under the sun, Bill would like to stake his claim on the following:

Posts Written by Bill Cokas:

Preventing racks and servers from overheating isn’t a problem many people face, but for those who do face it, it can be critical and lead to power outages, severe downtime and data and revenue loss. Fortunately, Eaton has an automated way to monitor and correct for this, a software known as Intelligent Power Manager, or…Keep Reading »

Bright Futures Press, through its founder Diane Lindsey Reeves, has had a long relationship with Strategic Insights and recently enlisted the agency to help her prepare an extensive series of textbooks for elementary and middle-grade readers. The objective of Bright Futures books is to help “prime the pump” with early career exploration experiences that get…Keep Reading »

You may be thinking, “but wait, isn’t that an Irish phrase that means ‘mentally unsound or eccentric, not in touch with reality, or incapacitated by alcohol?’” And our answer would be “all three!” But in this case, it means we’ve been awarded a Gold Pixie in the animation category for work we completed at the…Keep Reading »

In a bit of a belated announcement, Strategic Insights Brand Marketing is handling the graphic design, collateral and email marketing for the North Carolina Academy of General Dentistry, and has been since 2015. Founded in 1951, the Academy of General Dentistry has 37,000 members from the United States and Canada. Among the Academy’s many goals are offering…Keep Reading »

How ridiculous was the show “Name That Tune?” They played songs with a house orchestra, or worse, a lone piano. Your success on that show was entirely dependent on your encyclopedic knowledge of twentieth-century sheet music. All that aside, sometimes it IS possible to distill a value proposition down to a single word. In the…Keep Reading »

Written and directed by Diane Bloom, “An Unlikely Friendship” is an award-winning documentary about the altogether surprising bond that developed between CP Ellis, Exalted Grand Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan and outspoken black, woman activist Ann Atwater. The film documents how these two came together in an intensive community event that forced them to…Keep Reading »

A couple of our favorite work samples for your viewing pleasure:

We frequently ask ourselves, what business wouldn’t want to relocate to North Carolina? Then we answer ourselves, “Why, those who don’t know enough about it.” This ad campaign aimed to remedy just that.